After hearing news of Vine’s complete shutdown in the near future, hearts around the world have been shattered. What went wrong? Competitors ate it. The growth of major companies such as Instagram video streaming, Snapchat, Facebook videos and YouTube led minor companies like Vine to fall behind in trendy developments. Taking this course of action is not surprising, nor is it unreasonable. It is important to note that Twitter is actually the creator and investor of Vine, which makes Vine entirely dependent on Twitter.
Originally, it started out attracting the audience by inviting popular celebrities such as Shawn Mendes spawning on Vine, increasing its company awareness. However, Vine has not introduced any major improvements, activities or events that capture the audience’s attention. Either they need to step up their value proposition, or all their customers are soon going to jump ship.
Over the years, as Instagram introduced its new video stream debut, “Vine never recovered. That threat of stealing users and market share was real, and it worked,” (Rogers, 2016) according to the Mike Isaac, a tech reporter for Twitter. Additionally, the average amount of Vine users is gradually declining, with an overall population of 14% in the US using Vine. Such a small number of users begs Twitter the question: should we or should we not get rid of such a deadweight?
What once was a flourishing video streaming service now seems like a dying one.
However, although shutting down Vine may be the most profitable solution, I personally do not agree with this tactic. Isaac exclaims how Vine should be abandoned; no further improvements means no revenue and no revenue means it’s a real drain of money. That does not mean there is no hope yet for Vine. Think about the poor 200 million users who still currently use Vine. Twitter simply cannot ignore that substantial number of users. Chelsea Hassler, from the Slate.com, blogged about her views on why Vine should not be shut down. For her, Vine stood out from the other competitors because “the videos were a bite-sized, infinitely looping six seconds, you treasured not the one-off hits but the consistent creators.” (Hassler, 2016) I strongly agree with Hassler in that no matter how many companies will try to implement video streams, Vine will always remain the one that started it all. Having recession in the market does not mean Vine will never reach prosperity and having a weak value proposition does not mean Vine cannot find a new one. Vine still remains one of the thresholds that contains some of the world’s most popular videos and popular Viners. It should not be worth shutting down.
For a good chunk of the world, Vine’s “content vortex made the internet a better place.” (Hassler, 2016)
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